IDS Joins Logitech Collaboration Program

Delivering Turnkey Telehealth and MedSitter Virtual Patient Observation Solutions


After ten years of partnership—integrating video collaboration workspaces, enabling telehealth, and delivering virtual patient observation programs— it has joined the prestigious Logitech Collaboration Program (LCP). Through the LCP, not only do IDS and Logitech remain committed to facilitating remote communications and distance education, but they also unite to meet the growing demand of healthcare organizations’ urgent need to invest more time and resources into establishing and improving their telehealth offerings.

“We are very pleased that IDS has joined our program,” said Scott Wharton, Vice President and General Manager of Logitech Video Collaboration. “By closely collaborating with IDS, we are able to offer an enhanced collaboration experience to our joint customers.”

Now more than ever, IDS is helping healthcare providers and patients interact at a distance safely and effectively. “Advancements in virtual care technologies are playing a vital role in the ways in which hospitals provide their patients’ access and consume care,” says Tracy Mills, President, and CEO, of IDS. “However, strategies and tactics are changing, and providers are re-imagining their telehealth programs,” Mills adds. “Telehealth is no longer a point solution; it’s a long-term fixture of the organization. Fully integrated video solutions are not only facilitating greater access to virtual primary and specialty care but serving additional use cases, such as virtual patient observation.”

MedSitter, an IDS product, uses proprietary cloud-based software leveraging machine learning, vision intelligence, and natural language processing to provide care for multiple patients simultaneously—massively reducing the cost and staff resources required to provide 1:1 in-person patient monitoring.

“MedSitter is a great platform for virtual patient observation. The system allows for bi-directional communication between the patient and monitoring tech, as well as offers many languages,” shares Sonya Wood-Johnson, Quality Assurance Manager of Good Shepherd Penn Partners (GSPP). “Our team has found it useful for patient safety, staff safety, family dynamics, patient companionship (our patients interact well with the monitoring techs), and most recently, the system has been utilized for observing the donning and doffing PPE.”

The MedSitter in-room cart consists of the all-in-one Logitech MeetUp and a medical-grade touch-screen display mounted on a mobile cart connected to a software-equipped sitter station that can serve up to ten patients at once. The video interactivity enabled by the Logitech MeetUp reduces fall-related injuries, improves patient outcomes, enhances caregiver effectiveness, and improves overall clinical efficiency.

“Voice quality, as well as video quality, are crucial,” explains Nicholas Luthy, VP of Product and Marketing at IDS. “When developing MedSitter, we were on a mission to find an all-in-one conferencing solution where audio and visual streams were as lifelike as possible for trained Patient Safety Observers. That way, virtual monitoring could replace in-room patient sitting without sacrificing quality. After multiple rounds of testing a dozen different video camera vendors, our team found the Logitech MeetUp was the closest (if not better) to a human being in the room.”

Logitech products are also incorporated into the MedSitter Patient Observation stations. A Logitech webcam, headset, keyboard, and mouse are utilized for trained Patient Safety Observers to monitor multiple patients from a centralized location.

Hospital IT departments have an essential role to play in assisting hospital staff to manage and care for patients. The IT departments go beyond having the responsibility of managing clinical software and other processes that help administrative staff to keep patient records and admissions systems ticking along. They also have an important role to play in ensuring medical wards, operating rooms, labor, and delivery suites, and emergency departments run smoothly. “We understand healthcare IT leaders have many things demanding their attention each day. We’ve built MedSitter with what we have tested and proven to alleviate the daunting task of new software deployments,” says Luthy.

“Given our limited IT resources and competing priorities, we knew we could not host a solution ourselves. As a cloud hosted solution, the MedSitter solution allowed us to get up and running quickly and smoothly,” says Alex Nason, Director of IT Innovation at Frederick Health. “It was one of the smoothest technical and operational implementations we have had.”

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold, IDS expanded its MedSitter solution to support additional telemedicine use cases such as Virtual Visitations, Video Intercom, and Virtual Rounding. By incorporating Logitech technologies with IDS’ hardware + software integration capabilities, the organizations are ensuring their customers obtain every ounce of value from their hardware investment. IDS also builds custom telehealth solutions using medical-grade monitors, a variety of Logitech Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras, echo cancellation speaker + microphones, and USB peripherals, such as digital stethoscopes for real-time device streaming.

“On behalf of the IDS team, we’re thrilled to join LCP and help deliver a new standard in telehealth based on a shared vision of patient-centric solutions,” says Mills. “This is a unique opportunity to create industry-leading approaches to medical treatment in an established network of existing customers as well as the many new hospitals looking to add telehealth services to their roadmap.”